Tuesday 10 January 2012 03.00 EST
First published on Tuesday 10 January 2012 03.00 EST

A series of technological innovations in the classroom – including a game that requires players to solve quadratic equations – is set to change the way subjects as diverse as music and maths are taught in schools.

Department for Education officials are looking at a pilot scheme, currently running in nine schools in England, which uses computer programmes to teach maths.

The Cornerstone maths project is based on a successful US programme and explores concepts such as ratio and proportion using animations; cars racing across a screen are used to explain the relationship between distance and time.

And in some classrooms teachers are beginning to make use of technology such as the Kinect, a motion-capture device invented for gaming.

The maths games

Du Sautoy, holder of the Charles Simonyi chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, said: "We're trying to tap into that quite committed effort that kids put in to gaming, but to get through a level you have to understand mathematics. Kids very quickly sniff out when you're just getting them to do a maths problem to get through to the next graphic. [In these games] you actually have to build the geometry to get your character across the bridge in time to save you from something chasing you."

Games developed by the company Du Sautoy co-founded, Mangahigh, include the recently launched Wrecks Factor, in which pupils have to correctly factorise quadratic expressions to answer ships' distress calls and save their crews.

"We're not trying to replace the teacher – we're trying to facilitate them. The teacher can see when kids are engaging with the game, and can see the ones that are struggling, just doing it over and over again and not getting anywhere. They can channel their attention to the kids who need it."

The use of game technology gives children a clearer sense of the application of their academic studies, du Sautoy said.

"Games are a very powerful demonstration of the power of this [mathematical] language — how we depend on it everywhere. Why is Google successful? Its not Google elves [that deliver the search results]– its a clever bit of maths, which is not that complicated."

Classroom animations

The government is also helping to run a pilot of an initiative imported from the US, which uses computer visualisations to teach maths.

The pilot programme was launched in eight state schools and one private school in England this academic year, funded by a philanthropic organisation, the Li Ka Shing Foundation.

Pupils in key stage three compare images of girls sprinting across a field or cars racing each other with lines plotted on graphs that give the mathematical information in a different form.

Like Du Sautoy's games, the maths project uses the visual and narrative potential of computer animation to extend teachers' ability to explain concepts.

Phil Vahey, a senior research scientist at SRI international, the US research institute behind the maths project, said: "In traditional mathematics there is a lot of focus on graphs and algebraic representation, which is of course incredibly important, but if you only focus on these it's very hard for students to understand the deep ideas behind it."

Joan Deslandes, headteacher at Kingsford community school in Newham, east London, said her pupils were able to understand that graphs were "not just lines drawn in space, but used to generate a movement. That's quite a complicated idea for 11-year-olds.

"It's great to see pupils having fun ... There's been this feeling that maths is hard. What our pupils think is that maths is fun."

Using motion capture technology

The use of technology in schools marks an increasing convergence of the classroom with children's home lives.

Gareth Ritter, a teacher at a Willows high school in Cardiff, has begun using motion capture technology to harness his pupils' enthusiasm for playing games.

In Ritter's music lessons, children wave a conductor's baton to move icons of instruments to the right place in an orchestra, represented virtually on a computer screen.

The same technology can be used to teach biology or foreign languages, by having students virtually moving parts of the human body to the right place or matching up lists of words in English and French, Ritter said.

"A lot of the kids in my school play Call of Duty. If they fail a level they won't give up, they'll keep doing it. We've got to bring that [enthusiasm] into the classroom.

"One young lad [I taught] was a boy soldier in the Congo. I could see he had a passion for music. Now he's going to study music at university. Technology has changed his life – it's switched him on."

The use of interactive technology in the classroom has been accompanied by a move towards more flexible testing in exams that can be tailored more closely to individual pupils. The exam board AQA revealed last year that it was planning trials of an interactive exam that would generate harder or softer questions according to how a candidate performs.